It's always mobile phones that ruin good websites these days.
They optimise for swipe, scroll and tap. Look, like, emoji.
They don't optimise for text. In fact they are increasingly hostile to it. The Tinderfication of online dating has been a depressing race to the bottom.
The internet was never going to be as great as we thought it was. No other technology has been. Folks thought the telegraph would end wars and that TVs would have everyone soaking up a deep education. But that's not where the money was.
But I felt it wouldn't be this shitty. At some point we're all going to look back on that moment when Jobs held up the first iPhone that could run an app and regret it.
Don't know about battery life. I guess if it's AMOLED, https://www.greenbot.com/article/2834583/how-much-power-does...
https://www.reddit.com/r/redesign/comments/7p3iv9/where_is_d...
I still use it instead of the standard interface, it loads much faster especially on bad mobile connections.
Reddit should fit nicely into a mobile first site with good desktop functionality, it's just their useless team of designers.
One day we'll be the old men yelling at internet clouds while sitting behind an old PC or some kind of open source terminal running an open source OS and weeping for the past.
This is also as far as I know still true for a lot of other productivity-type uses of computers -- even though mobile and tablets are also used in some of this space, they often seem more auxiliary. Most of the serious professional tools for, say, business (eg spreadsheets, accounting, inventory, etc.) or even artistic uses (music, photo editing, etc.) also are primarily keyboard / mouse oriented. Tablet oriented tools definitely exist (especially in the art space), but a lot of times its not a primary use case, except perhaps in communication tools.
Mobile space is a walled garden, designed more simply for limited real estate and touch, with more difficulty to poke around (there is no real equivalent in the mobile world to open a web site, hit F12, and poke around). That's fine -- PCs / laptops haven't disappeared, and if a kid showed an interest in programming, you'd get them one. :)
Now, the original poster may have been referring to the new world of social. I did more enjoy the long form of social (eg blogs) that popped up in the 00s. Versus the current social world, dominated by only a few firms that are highly motivated to manipulate your feed, tweak your emotions, and optimize the dispersion of ads (and other low-quality tabloid junk). It's my "old man yells at cloud" pet peeve, I suppose. Not exactly a mobile device problem, though.
We'll be the last guerillas in the long-lost War on General Purpose Computing.
1. This change is much smaller and less destructive than digg's big change (although the long term effects can be just as destructive).
2. When Digg's redesign caused an exodus, Reddit was extremely well known as "that ugly digg clone" and "this digg link was on Reddit yesterday". Reddit doesn't have a well known established "number two" the way digg did. Raddleme is a leftist fringe site, voat is a racist fringe site, HN is a technology fringe site. Discord servers rely on Reddit for discoverability and member vetting. When this has been discussed before, I've never seen a viable candidate mentioned. Since the only people who can leave are people who only use fringe topics, Reddit won't be able to loose critical mass and then the fringers will have to come back.
On the other hand, these changes appear to be a step into the Twitter/Instagram/facebook market. I'm curious if Reddit will be ready in time to take advantage of this upcoming Facebook exodus, also if there will even be an exodus.
It actually makes me appreciate Reddit a bit more -- it can be garbage, but it's also a bit of a centralized meeting place for so many smaller communities. Even if the bulk of those smaller communities doesn't take place on Reddit itself, they still flow through Reddit.
Reddit is like the central bazaar of discoverability. The community you end up in might not live on Reddit, but in all likelihood, you discovered it through Reddit.
So despite how terrible the big communities can be (which is not a Reddit-exclusive problem), I'm still glad it exists. Maybe an alternative is needed, but at the very least, I respect how Reddit has mostly retained this unique ability over the years.
It's possible to talk about "The Average Redditor" or "The Average New Yorker" or "The Average Tokyo Resident", because statistics isn't about community, but the whole reason Reddit has survived at the size it is is precisely because subreddits allow different people to have vastly different views of "what's on Reddit" based on subscription/unsubscription. This allows The_Donald and EnoughTrumpSpam and dozens of other communities which would fight like cats in a sack were they ever mixed to share the same service.
So Reddit isn't a community. It's a pre-made hosted platform to build a community meeting point that you can largely (or completely, via invitation-only private subreddits) insulate from all the other communities on the same platform.
The dark horse, in my opinion, is spectrum.chat. It is fast, beautiful and being iterated on daily. It is also open source and open to feedback. The real time chat combines the best of discord and slack and the design is a step up from both of those and it.
It might not be a direct replacement to Reddit, but I think it could steal some traffic as it develops. Plus it is driven by a revenue model based on subscribers, not ads, sidestepping the current FB public relations issues.
Maybe the purpose of the redesign is something like monetization? Or maybe they are just out of touch and by the time they really understood the community’s point of view, the decisions had been made, so the Reddit employees tasked with handling the community response can’t really say or do much.
It's like with cafés - visitors likes them quiet, and would very much enjoy having an electrical outlet near the table (to charge up phone) and even free Wi-Fi. But cafés aren't in business of making peoples' life better and more enjoyable, they're in business of selling coffee - so they'll actively remove electrical outlets, remove their Wi-Fi and make the place noiser, to increase turnover.
EDIT: I’d love to see actual measured metrics published showing a particular design change actually making sense. Is the new one faster for any particular task? Does it generate more signups? More revenue? Not saying these guys didn’t measure this, but publishing the results would be fascinating.
Is there an example of a site who rolled out a big redesign and then actually reversed course based on end user feedback?
The Netflix stock chart tells the tale nicely: https://i.imgur.com/sZ9FjeP.jpg
How it differs from "Hot" though is not clear to me. Maybe they try harder to show you fresh posts.
Thanks for the Wired link. That actually shows it. Yeah, I agree it looks quite facebook-like.
Edit: Thanks for the helpful replies - however staying completely off Reddit is probably better for my overall wellbeing. Reddit is no longer a "happy place" for me, the racists, trolls, shills, and bigots have ruined it for me. To top it off, I was recently banned by admins (not mods) for "attempting to evade a subbreddit ban" which was a result of my using a VPN - no thanks.
Hands down the best Reddit app for iOS.
It may lack some niceties, but i find it gets the job done and is open source (and was originally built to cache sub-reddits).
Starter pack: https://www.reddit.com/.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/all.compact https://www.reddit.com/message/inbox/.compact
This gives the old reddit mobile experience, which is far lighter and better. But some things are broken, e.g. "submit" is broken; "parent" take you to the modern mobile version (but "conext" works); "sidebar" needs a separate page.
To any reddit admins reading: please don't take this functionality away.
e.g.
I personally find this quicker to type.
To be clear, I'm running this on a brand new iPhone X, so I've got plenty of power to run the app. The site works in my mobile browser, but the app has serious reliability problems.
If anyone at Reddit is reading this, please stop pushing the mobile app so hard. You're actively making things worse by pushing a highly unreliable app!
Also, please make it possible to sort by "Rising" on the mobile site and app (should I ever be able to connect again). On busy news days, things move fast enough that "Rising" is the only way to keep up, yet the option is mysteriously inaccessible on mobile.
It's entirely possible to build a website that works well in the browser on my phone AND on my desktop.
Somewhere under preferences you can disable this bullshit forever.
The website is still a travesty though.
1. That I've found.
2. For unauthenticated sessions.
I hit Reddit via Incognito mode frequently. That goddamned nag shows up every goddamned time.
Yes, you'd expect it to be gone after the first time you dismiss it, but you will probably still want to know that you can remove it :)
I'm sure this is fun for people who use reddit regularly but as only an occasional visitor I would rather do without it.
As in, it stops loading posts, and stops infinite scrolling, so you have to basically kill the app, then go back into it.
I don't see how that is more useful than the website or a better experience.
Also another issue is that many links just don't work. I can't see `streamable` and many others because the page that opens has no touch detection. I have to select `...` then go to `Open in Safari` to make it work.
Reddit and YouTube are the only things stopping my IPad from gathering dust.
Unfortunately intra-reddit links cause all the usual problems.
But yes, mobile behaviour is rage-inducing.
Shamless plug: you can see this behaviour in the two screenshots in lower left corner in this post https://grumpy.website/post/0PhBPyfR- Reddit redesigned the AMP page to include some comments, but the behaviour is essentially the same.
Once you open up 10 tabs (how I typically browse Reddit, by shift clicking each thread I want to read) I can hear my CPU fans kicking in. I had to tune Firefox to use 6 cores instead of 4 to get any decent performance. I may just end up going back to the old design :/
I'm not sure what computers/browsers Reddit's UI/UX team has been testing on, or if they've ever tried to open multiple pages at once, but this is a pretty blatant issue.
Thumbnails waste space depending on the subreddit. Infinite scroll destroys the idea of a discrete "front page" which is core to Reddit being the front page of the Internet. In addition the infinite scroll makes no sense in the comments where on Mobile you can jump between top-level parent comments whereas on Desktop it's too busy loading child comments before you can get to the next top-level parent comment. The right sidebar is persistent and serves little purpose for a power user. The left sidebar which provides core navigation for a power user is useful when persistent but loads asynchronously with the middle, main content for it to be a consistent user experience.
Take Amazon for example. If they went from the design 5-7 years ago straight to the current design, there would be uproar, Stock price dip etc.
The incremental approach allows the site owner to both roll back bad ideas but also condition users into where the design is heading.
(Correction: not Conde Nast) The owner, has a plan, which is clearly not inline with the current Reddit usage, this is not the approach to get to that goal.
I am struggling to think of big drops like this working, anyone?
Gmail has done major overhauls all in one go. So has Dropbox. Google calendars. Google earth. Apple's main site. Most newspaper's sites. Bitbucket. Facebook has had several. All of these have irritated some portion of users who decried the death of the product, yet eventually people get used to it. I think it works more often than not.
And if we went suddenly from Amazon of five years ago[1] to the Amazon of today I don't think there would be that much of an uproar. It's basically the same site, just with minor colour and layout changes.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130316112319/http://www.amazon...
The most dramatic change has been to "community" features. Amazon feels it is enough of a monopoly now that it now longer has to attract customers through the ability to discuss things. The discussion boards were shut down, and similarly the ability to leave a comment under someone's product review was restructured so that that feature no longer serves to let people maintain a lively conversation among themselves about the author or musician. Many listings now only show by default reviews from customers who actually brought the product; this was done to tackle the problem of shill reviewers, but it also eviscerated the community that had popped up to share their feelings on even library loans because for nearly two decades Amazon had let anyone review and discuss books and music.
The page to see your review history has been changed so that it is now an infinite scroll. While infinite scroll is a very popular design choice these days, I can’t help but wonder if Amazon also wanted to make it difficult for the reviewers with 1000+ reviews to easily move their content to another site.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/04/gmail-com-redesign-l...
Reddit has already been down this path with Pao. If they don't like how the site is being run they will depart or revolt.
And I suspect bigger, more visible ads/paid content
Reddit's not perfect, but trash-tier clickbait titles is not something I'm accustomed to seeing on there, nor do I want to.
Even if they intend to keep the old design available forever (very unlikely), it means that they now have the same number of developers supporting twice as much UI. So obviously that means they will not be able to deliver bug fixes as rapidly, etc.
At first, I thought something was rewriting the whole content of my browser. And then, I realized, no, this is their "redesign". On mobile, the site is unusable - as in a overlay bar blocks all clicks or anything - for at least 30 seconds. Being on a laptop wasn't much better. There, it was 10 seconds of unusuability, per loaded page.
It took me 3 minutes to navigate to turn off beta. From there, it went back to the decent site I'm used to. Well, except a button in the upper left band that states "TRY THE REDESIGN"... Uhh, no.
All good things must come to an end. There is an end to everything, to good things as well.
Of course, when I try the preview myself, I'm greeted with this:
This one at least has some screenshots of the new design. It feels like a Facebook clone to me. In particular it looks like they're flattening comments to be like FB rather than the thread? model that Reddit has today.
It's not as easy to figure out on your own, but it's a significant improvement IMO.
The problem appeared to be one of resizing the old log in page correctly for the new layout. Regardless, not my issue as a stupid user to have to debug log in pages for a major website.
If this sort of basic thing is missing in the redesign, they have big problems ahead.
That would be a huge issue if they really did that. RES will probably step in and fix that.
With the new redesign, it is Facebook - people share a link, you click the comments section, it shows you the top comments, you upvote the top comments (or the ones that agree with your view), and rinse and repeat till infinity, because you have infinite scroll. Which is not how I want the future Reddit to look like.
Yes, it is good for advertisers. Yes, it is good for the the new wave of people who will arrive from Facebook.
But it is utterly disheartening for Reddit to stray so far from what I viewed its core emphasis as - comments.
I left just before they pushed out the redesign due their increased censorship but from what I can see now it is a random chance that a sub will work with JS disabled. Half the time the post content in a div that only is rendered visible when you turn on JS. You can read it if you view source but not in the browser's native interface.
I gotta say though:
>increased censorship
That's ridiculous. They're "censoring" all kinds of bottom-of-the-barrel racist and disturbing shit which simply should not be on a mainstream website (which reddit simply is now). I don't see any idealistic reason to keep /r/fatpeoplehate. The "everything that's legal" ideal is cute for some edgy website you create out of college, but a platform of reddit's size simply gives too much room for content to fall on the wrong side of the line.
They've also banned people legally arranging sales of alcohol, tobacco & firearms.
Just look at cloudflare. The CEO did it out of spite and now they'll have to censor everything. It's already being used in court against them to force it even though they don't want to.
Once you're not just a host for discussion or not just a dumb pipe your job becomes to censor everything.
Similar things happen with discourse on facebook and twitter, where calls for ethnic cleansing by white people are often overlooked, while angry posts by people of colour that offend white people will get deleted or get users banned. It's really no wonder that US politics has gone the way it has when there is so much McCarthyism embedded in the moderation of these public forums.
JS can be used to enhance the experience, and even build things otherwise impossible in the browser, and it's totally justified. But taking the newest, shinest web application framework and turning what's a tree of regular web documents into a web application, with data unaccessible if you don't run the entirety of its JS? That's just wrong.
This benefits more than just one tiny group of users: it might also aid disabled users and accessibility software (not to mention the developers of that software), security nuts, people who turn js off to improve performance on low-spec machines (it's 2018 here, but more than a few countries have a four (or even three!) figure GDP/capita, so their machines aren't going to be 2018 machines. This is just off the top of my head, how many other groups might there be that would benefit?
JS is the technology responsible for most of the malware infections and spyware ad-tracking. It's not like people disable it just to piss off developers, there are very good reasons to turn it off.
Reddit started sucking the larger it got. It was decent from 2005-2010, been a shitfest since and increasingly getting worse.
The early flame wars were fun though when they first got comments working.
You can see this in a lot of topic related subreddits, if something is extremely popular, you'll get downvoted for calling out any faults. Eventually people just stop posting.
It's not just downvoting, though. Reddit also lets the moderators act like real censors and they are completely unaccountable. There is no way to visit a subreddit and know whether the discussion there is censored or not. So you have to assume it is.
At this point, the only reason I still hold a (read only) Reddit account is so I can turn implicit censorship like thresholding and front page blocks off. HN, unlike reddit, still has value as a discussion medium, but I wish that "showdead" didn't make the posts unreadable.
But on a personal note, if you can't find interesting, intelligent content on Reddit, that is a criticism of yourself, not Reddit. Reddit houses some fascinatingly talented, smart, engaging people across a vast array of subject matter.
Should they be criticized by that?
Maybe take the time to share some of that interesting content here to parent to change his view instead of denouncing him. (https://xkcd.com/1053/)
The type of content that Reddit's design encourages most would be meme-blogging in the style of r/me_IRL
